


To Fix a Broken Heart

by flamingdongsaeng



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Fluff, Introspection, Kinda, Lots of it, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pining, Romance, Slow Burn, an adorable idiot, kags is an idiot sometimes, long intro sorry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-02 00:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4039942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamingdongsaeng/pseuds/flamingdongsaeng
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Kageyama's heart is broken and is in need of fixing. He wonders if he found Hinata, or was it Hinata who found him.</p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <br/>
    <i>"In that moment after dying, in the black confinements where only your thoughts exist to ponder on how one has lived his life, Tobio is certain that regret would be the only emotion he would feel if he did not try. Trying is a consolation of failing, as we are acknowledged of our own limitations, that we are only human who break and are far from being perfect beings.</i>
    <br/>
  </p>
</blockquote><blockquote>
  <p>    <i>Tobio is perfectly fine with the consolation of trying."</i><br/></p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	To Fix a Broken Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired from a comic that I saw while lurking 9gag. The bromance is real. Please do comment as I am only an occasional writer who writes when I can't fall asleep. ;A;

Kageyama Tobio has always been told that life is a journey. He can’t count the times he’s heard that it is liken to a path with a thousand forks or a road with an unknown dead end. His nose wrinkles as he stopped to realize that he has been thinking of similar thoughts as the people around him. The only difference between their ideas lies in the fact that instead of roads or paths or processes, he thinks of a book that depicts a foreseeable end if you stick around long enough to recognize your fate. It’s just that people go as far as licking the pages as if to dare the Creator to hasten one’s story, to live a fast-paced time to meet Death’s grasp when life was just barely lived.

  
Tobio believes that fate is not inevitable. A predetermined turn of events, as they say, but people cannot in point of fact believe that there is only one course of events a person could follow. The mere thought creates furrows in his eyebrows as he shakes his head in incredulity. He believes in choice and chance, effects that could possibly change the next predetermined set; the butterfly effect, he recalls.

  
Live carefully, his parents suggest, for it is possible to draw the story long enough that the ink-laden pages fade away and are overwritten with another set of words, sentences, paragraphs, and meaning to create another story altogether. In retrospect, although you can change the means; the climax of your own book, one cannot ever turn away from a living creature’s true ending: death. It’s a representation of demise, he surmises, as every person’s book ends in it.

  
Therefore, Tobio decides, that the true judgment of a person’s value is not only how long their book is, but also on how well it is written.

  
This is when Kagayama resolves to set out on a journey to find his cure. Although his book cannot be as long as he wished it would be, his pride would not allow it to be a book that a single person wouldn’t even bother to look at in an archival, gathering dust and sitting on the farthest corner of the shelves.  
This is also when he gets wind of a special person making his own name in a town at the opposite end of the land.

  
If it could, his heart hidden in his pocket would’ve swelled with hope.

  
Maybe it was an instinctive move, to explore the land after all these years, because he dreads that the only image that would flashback in dilapidated reels of film is of his own abode. He shudders in fear when he thinks of the unknown, but what he fears more is of not knowing anything at all.

 

* * *

  
Tobio did not know of a time when his heart wasn’t broken. It became a fact of nature to him that his heart did not look like anyone else’s, it was like knowing for a fact that the sun rises in the east and drowns in darkness in the west.

  
Still, he was fortunate. His parents loved him despite being broken. He remembers his mother’s hand gently holding his own little one as he was being led to an awaiting carriage. He remember his father shielding his family from malicious eyes and poignant whispers as he repeats the same string of words to onlookers who came for nothing but to satisfy their own curiosity and to hate without reason.

 

“There is nothing wrong with him.”

  
The sound is sharp like a knife and it sounds terrifyingly clear in Tobio’s ears amidst the scourge of incoherent buzzing and movement all around him. He feels time slowing down as he weaves through the crowd, creating tiny partitions of space while passing though. The mood is tinged red; angry and restless even though there was never physical contact between little Tobio and his family, in the fear of being afflicted with the supposed curse that he carries. It was the kind of red that made his blood run cold instead of a warmth that is usually associated with the color.

 

“There is nothing wrong with him.”

  
But the irony contained in those words leave a bitter aftertaste on his father’s tongue as he closes the carriage door and asks their chauffeur to lead them away. Why would they leave if there wasn’t anything wrong with his son? Perhaps what he said was politically incorrect, and the words left his mouth in the heat of the moment.

  
At that time, if he would ask himself, if he would truly be honest to himself, then yes, there is something wrong with his son. He is broken. He can admit that to himself, but what he truly wanted to say was that he wasn’t a curse and the rumors about broken hearts aren’t true. He didn’t have any basis on his claims, but he believes in it anyway. As he grips his wife’s hand with reassuring pressure, as he counts the gallops of the horse that drags their carriage away from the people who persecuted his son, he has to believe it was true.

  
If he and his wife didn’t believe in their son, then nobody would.

  
They travel for one week straight, only stopping to eat and to rest, until they reached the hometown of Tobio’s mother comprised of only a hundred people. This is where he grew up to be a man. He wasn’t cursed, if curses involved fatality, calamities or famine and it was something they confirmed through the expanses of time they have spent there.

  
He was safe and was not victimized because his parents decided to hide the locket that held his heart. While others wear it like a necklace or on their sleeves, the Kageyama family opted to keep the lockets inside their trousers in the supporting logic that it is but a family tradition. Nobody questioned them, and Tobio’s parents sigh in relief.

  
In spite of that, Kageyama Tobio still believes he is cursed. Even though he does not bring people he loves demise and violent deaths, it was a curse that is bestowed only upon himself.

  
The locket stays hidden from prying eyes, and Tobio has never felt more alone.

 

* * *

  
The most peculiar thing about having knowledge of one’s own premature end is the acceptance of death in an almost eerie calmness but with an underlying dull ache constantly throbbing to remind you of the events to follow. Not everybody has the knowledge of the end of their time, and just by knowing sends chills down the spine and creates tremors on the heart like rivulets of water disturbing the serene peace of a tranquil lake.

  
Those constant throbs soon quiet, it doesn’t die down, but one just gets used to the pain beating persistently on a dying heart.

  
Tobio’s carriage moves at a speed that is more than a leisurely pace but less than one uses in racing. It was fast, yet not at breakneck. It was slow, but not too sluggish. He sits inside his carriage inappropriately, with his legs spread wide and his tie askew. He doesn’t care if people peek and see his current state. He was not a gentleman, and never will he be.

  
He takes out his locket absentmindedly from the pocket of his trousers; the dull irregular beating unnerves him still even after all these years. It opens with a click and the hand at his side clenches tight. Naïve as it might be, Tobio still believes that one day, in one of the countless times that he looks at his Heart, it will be normal. But he disappoints himself every time he sees the dark fissures and cracks increasing in number and size, surrounding his heart like poisonous vines: infecting and fatal. He feels as if any moment his Heart will collapse and cave in, leaving him cold and lifeless.

  
It was his pride that dictates him to not go down without a fight. It was a horrendous thought, fighting against fate and trying to defy death, but he still has to try.  
In that moment after dying, in the black confinements where only your thoughts exist to ponder on how one has lived his life, Tobio is certain that regret would be the only emotion he would feel if he did not try. Trying is a consolation of failing, as we are acknowledged of our own limitations, that we are only human who break and are far from being perfect beings.

  
Tobio is perfectly fine with the consolation of trying.

 

* * *

 

The raven-haired man tries not to gape as his feet landed on uneven ground as he steps off his carriage. He is the exact definition of a sheltered noble, and it is for a reason. A town is a peculiar place, and he thinks that it is of another dimension as he treads carefully through the crowd. How odd that a difference in the size of the population affects the entirety of a community. He unconsciously compares the dull and monotonous life he has lived in the little village he calls home with the hustle and bustle of the town that is in front of him right now. He immediately nods at his chauffeur who then proceeds to the nearest inn for the young master’s lodging.

  
He briefly looks up at the darkening sky, thinking that it would be a cloudburst this late afternoon. The specks of saturated condensation swirl in dark spirals and Tobio is entranced for a millisecond, imagining his body being sucked into its depths like leaves carried by a gentle breeze. He takes two lungs-full of air and brings his head back to the horizon.

  
The marketplace is the busiest. Tobio looks to his left and sees a variety of stores lined up in the alleyway selling a collection of items he has never seen in his life. Fruits (apples were in season), cabbage, and cured meat were all that he could name. In the corner of his eye, he sees an elderly woman haggling with a merchant to give her three pieces of what looked like frog’s meat for the price of two.

  
On his right, he sees numerous stores that sell clothing, talismans, decorations, and heart adornments, along with sellers and their well-rehearsed lines of persuasion in order to peddle their goods. He feels a pang of envy as he observes a group of girls picking gemstones for their heart lockets, in the thought of making their hearts more appealing. He wills himself to look away as the hidden locket in his trousers seems to weigh more than it really is. A burden, he thinks his heart is. No one wants an already broken heart.

  
A squeaking sound fills the threshold of his hearing, it is faint, but it is there. Tobio ignores the uneasy beat of his heart.

  
“Heart lockets! Heart lockets for sale! Get your lockets here!”

  
A small, feminine voice seemed to pierce through the bustling crowd and Tobio whipped his head to the side. At the end of the ocean of people pushing in from all directions, unmindful of each other, is a young woman. She wears a red hood over a simple white dress. Her stillness eerily contrasts the ever-moving crowd and it’s almost as if the girl is only from his imagination, that if he blinks or averts his gaze, she might disappear in thin air. Only that she doesn’t, and Tobio still could not shake the feeling inside his gut that there is something off about the rigidity of the girl.

  
But what struck him the most is what the girl was selling. It was impossible to sell heart lockets, as far as Tobio knew, because it they were sold, he would not be so far away from home in order to fix his broken heart. It was an oddity beyond Tobio’s comprehension.

  
“Mister, buy your heart locket here!” The girl exclaims, and seemingly lifeless eyes go straight after Tobio. Her stare sends a multitude of chills down his spine as he creeps closer, treading through the chattering crowd, his muscles tense as if ready to spring into action at any moment.

  
The girl blinks once, close to mechanical in the way her eyelids close and unclose in an almost sluggish manner. The squeaking grows louder in his ears as he approaches her, his anticipation growing as he braves to close the gap between them.

 


End file.
